My wife and I were drinking gin-and-tonics with old friends in their lovely backyard garden. As I talked about my reporting on prison issues, I began to describe how our “correctional” system had turned into a monster over the past 30 years.

The facts are almost unbelievable: As a nation, our incarceration rate is five times what it was 30 years ago and the highest in the world. We have five percent of the world’s population and 25 percent of its prisoners — over 2 million human beings, whose detention costs us annually about $25,000 a person. Only in America are there tens of thousands of mostly mentally ill inmates kenneled in “supermaxes,” where the prolonged solitary confinement is, under the United Nations’ and Amnesty International’s definitions, torture. Nearly 70 percent of ex-cons return to crime. No matter how many prisons we build, they become overcrowded. And much of the world sees American capital punishment as barbaric.

“I’ll tell you what should be done,” the man said, looking at me sternly. “It would cut down on the overcrowding and the expense. There’s an answer for people who repeatedly break the rules of society: Kill them.”

He was not joking.

An intelligent and highly educated man, he is much more conservative than I, but I had always found his conservatism nuanced. There wasn’t any nuance on this issue.

His wife quickly changed the topic. My wife and I didn’t stay long. I wondered aloud to her about what had happened. I didn’t believe my friend really wanted to have hundreds of thousands of prisoners executed. So where the hell did this stance come from? Maybe he was the victim of a crime. But his harshness fit with American policy toward lawbreakers.

A few days later, I sat on the sunny deck of a Belfast ice-cream parlor interviewing Bo Lozoff, a salty-talking self-described spiritual teacher who has visited 1100 prisons in 34 years. To a lot of convicts, he is a guru. His Human Kindness Foundation has given nearly 500,000 copies of his book, We’re All Doing Time, free to prisoners. It has a foreword by the Dalai Lama. He was touring the state giving public talks and holding “workshops” in the prisons to teach inmates how to become calmer and kinder — with limited results, he admitted.

Given his great experience, could he explain the American incarceration madness?

“Prisoners are the new niggers, gooks, kikes,” he replied. Criminals are the present-day, socially acceptable objects of hatred, the scapegoats, and this hatred is fueled by media and political opportunism.

As a reporter, I knew about political opportunism. I had just received a press release from Bill Diamond, the Democratic state senator who heads the Criminal Justice Committee. Because a judge had given a light sentence to a man who possessed child pornography, Diamond suggested heavier sentences for a whole class of offenders. Only months before, he had publicly agonized about prison overcrowding.

Treating prisoners harshly helps create the overcrowding, Lozoff added. Most criminals are locked up for nonviolent crimes, but prisons are violent and neglectful. Rehabilitation has been abandoned. On their release, resentful ex-convicts abuse society. Thus, the high recidivism rate.

Death in the Supermax A 25-year-old inmate killed himself in the state’s Supermax prison on October 5, corrections officers say. But while a Rockland newspaper quoted the prison warden as saying the inmate was not considered a suicide risk, Ryan Rideout had a long history of mental illness and suicidal behavior.

Press behind bars As a reporter, I can attest that the rules the state agreed to in the 1970s on news-media access to prisoners have been violated by the Corrections Department in its recent practices.

Arbitrary injustice Fears doesn't like the particular prison where he now resides. He would prefer to be in one near his family in Arizona, and not in solitary confinement.

Prisoners as commodities If Baldacci goes around the Legislature with an emergency order, a big division could open between the governor and the Legislature.

Learn about life behind bars Our contentious American prison system — overcrowded, disproportionately populated by minorities, and, increasingly, privately operated — is not just an abstract liberal cause.

Imprisoned facts Although I had already written a lot about abuse in the prison, this May 21 interview with Dorney, a 28-year-old Portland man serving 20 years for assault, was what I had been waiting for.

Hunger strike at Maine's Supermax Prison Inmates at the Maine State Prison’s solitary-confinement Supermax unit in Warren have been on a hunger strike since Saturday night. Death in the Supermax. By Lance Tapley

SUBVERSIVE SUMMER | June 18, 2014 Prisons, pot festivals, and Orgonon: Here are some different views of summertime Maine — seen through my personal political lens.

LEFT-RIGHT CONVERGENCE - REALLY? | June 06, 2014 “Unstoppable: A Gathering on Left-Right Convergence,” sponsored by consumer advocate Ralph Nader, featured 26 prominent liberal and conservative leaders discussing issues on which they shared positions. One was the minimum wage.

STATE OF POLARIZATION | April 30, 2014 As the campaign season begins, leading the charge on one side is a rural- and northern-Maine-based Trickle-Down Tea Party governor who sees government’s chief role as helping the rich (which he says indirectly helps working people), while he vetoes every bill in sight directly helping the poor and the struggling middle class, including Medicaid expansion, the issue that most occupied the Legislature this year and last.

MICHAEL JAMES SENT BACK TO PRISON | April 16, 2014 The hearing’s topic was whether James’s “antisocial personality disorder” was enough of a mental disease to keep him from being sent to prison.